Grant Bowler

After decades of work on television in New Zealand and his native Australia, Grant Bowler came to Hollywood where he launched a slow-burning but consistent career. American audiences first came to kno...
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Editors at the New York Times Magazine recently published an article titled This Is What You Get When You Hire Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie, detailing her alleged bad behaviour during the making of upcoming erotic thriller The Canyons.
An audio recording of Lohan yelling furiously at her The Canyons co-star James Deen subsequently surfaced online, but fellow actor Bowler has now stepped forward to insist he never saw a nasty side to her when they were working on their TV biopic of Dame Elizabeth Taylor.
Bowler, who portrayed Richard Burton in the film, previously insisted working with Lohan involved "exercises in patience and... tolerance" but he is adamant she never treated him badly.
He tells E! Online, "I never got yelled at. We had a lot of quiet and intense conversations. We didn't have that (turbulent) relationship at all. To be completely fair to Lindsay, that did not happen. She didn't threaten me at all...
"We had a lot of quiet, serious conversations about characters and we worked very, very hard. And we both ensured that when we came to set, we came to set very, very serious. That's the God's honest truth."
The actor also refuses to comment on speculation about Lohan's troubled private life, adding, "My experience with any actor is from action to cut, everything else is none of my business."

If you’re a fan of Battlestar Galactica, video games, or anything and everything science fiction, then we’ve got a show for you! From the masterminds who brought you Battlestar Galactica and Farscape, Defiance is the newest drama to join the Syfy family.
Defiance is set in the not-too-distant future after an alien species named Votans come to earth in hopes of finding a new home following the destruction of their star system. After years of trying to negotiate with earth, the Votans declared war with the humans and triggered a terraformer technology that dramatically altered the biosphere and surface of the planet. Decades of war later, the humans and Votans no longer have any functional governments, and are doing their best to survive on their new alien planet. Executive Producer Kevin Murphy tells reporters at the Television Critics Association on Monday that the world of Defiance centers heavily on Chief Lawkeeper Jeb Nolan (Grant Bowler) and his feral-like adopted alien daughter Irisa (Stephanie Leodindas). After surviving in the wild, Nolan returns to his hometown of St. Louis only to find that it has been reduced to a refugee camp called Defiance.
Leodindas says that their character’s father/daughter relationship is “fiercely loyal,” but also “fiery” at times. Bowler explains that his his character chooses to live in Defiance because he desperately wants his daughter to learn the traditional values and mannerisms of pre-war earth. “She needs to learn how to hold a knife and fork. She needs to learn how to go on a date with a boy without hurting him,” Bowler says.
Murphy reveals that audiences will be introduced to eight species—including humans— that now inhabit the earth. In an interesting 21st century twist, Syfy is also offering viewers a chance to further explore the alien-filled planet in the Defiance videogame. Syfy President Mark Stern explains that with the show and the game, Defiance is the future of transmedia entertainment.
By playing the game and watching the show, fans will gather all the secrets of the world of Defiance. Stern was careful to explain that audiences do not need to use both mediums to enjoy Defiance. “It’s not choose your own adventure… You do not need to know anything about one to enjoy the other.” However, Murphy adds that of you follow both, fans will "get a richer, fuller, experience" and it will create “the illusion of spontaneity.” You can catch the series premiere of Defiance April 15 on Syfy.
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It's official: everyone watched Liz &amp; Dick last night. The name of Lifetime's fifth grade book report about the life and times of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton was trending on Twitter last night when the movie aired and catty chatter about it was as inescapable as the White Diamonds perfume ads in the '80s. It was probably because everyone was waiting to see just how awful Lindsay Lohan as the violet-eyed legend would be. While we wait for the official ratings to come (and they're probably going to be as big as one of Liz's caftans) let's talk about some of the movie's worst moments.
Yes, they were all pretty bad, but I have to say a highlight for me was when Lindsay, as Liz, screams from her chaise lounge in the backyard of her compound in Gstaad, "I'm bored. I'm so bored," with a flatness that can be only likened to cardboard that has been run over by a steamroller. Oh, no, wait. The worst was when Richard (played gamely by Grant Bowler) gets all mad at Liz on the set of Cleopatra and then she goes in her dressing room and cries and Richard walks up behind her and says, "Don't hate me," and she replies, "I don't hate you. I loathe you." Um, Lindz, aren't those the same thing?
There are so many silly moments to enumerate: Liz flashing the paparazzi her ass, her opining "I want more. I want more!," or the "Cleo-Fat-Ra" headlines when Liz's waistline doesn't change once in the whole movie. Oh, what about when the couple gets in a huge fight and Lindsay tries to make up by going into her partner's bedroom and mewing, "Elizabeth wants to play." That was pretty awful. OH! Or what about the scene where the purser from the hotel comes in to ask if they need one room or two and their banter involves a pun which likens Burton's performance of Hamlet to his penis. And then when we see his Hamlet (not his penis, him actually playing the part) it is as dull as a rusty knife. OH, and then there is a curtain call and there are no women on the stage, even though there are female characters in the play, and Dick makes Liz come up on stage and I crawled into myself so far that I actually inverted like a human Popple.
Those are some of my favorite bad moments of the movie. What about yours? Let us know. Misery loves company, and I think we're in good company thinking this was absolutely miserable.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: Lifetime]
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Lifetime is currently the world's biggest troll. While its headquarters may or may not be under a bridge, it is behaving like an Internet troll, doing something negative in hopes for attention. Yes, I'm talking about Liz &amp; Dick, its new original movie in which human Scared Straight documentary Lindsay Lohan tries to play screen legend Elizabeth Taylor. It airs tonight at 9 PM and will get all the attention Lifetime is hoping for. Outrage followed her casting and Lindsay does nothing to counter claims that she is not up to the job. But here we are – all talking about it and probably all watching. You can't say trolls are not successful.
The problem with Liz &amp; Dick is not that it's bad (and it is as bad as getting bedbugs while you're sick with the flu), but that it is not bad enough to be entertaining. There is no camp here. It is just blandly awful in a way that most Lifetime movies are. Actually, the TV movie, which chronicles Taylor's long courtship and on-again-off-again relationship with actor Richard Burton, is exactly what we should expect. It's a typical Lifetime TV movie. It hews close to the network formula: The two have a meet-cute on the set of Cleopatra, complete with faux-funny hijinks, and the plinky music is an aural cue for anyone who has ever enjoyed a bad movie marathon that they are watching a made-for-cable rom-com. And the film ends quite the same way, with tragedy and obstacle heaped upon misunderstanding and breakup until we discover, in the end, that they were the loves of each other's lives in the first place.
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And that is why Lifetime is a troll. We can't fault it for providing the Platonic ideal of a "Lifetime movie" — that is what they are known for, after all. But somehow, we feel like we were promised more. This is Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor. The fact that she was cast in this project seemed to signal that the network would try harder, to give us something better than Amish Grace or Abducted: The Carlina White Story. But it doesn't. Its big push to make this popular has nothing to do with quality, but rather the gimmick of hiring LiLo to play La Liz. It is a pure and brilliant troll.
As for Lindsay, she is atrocious. She doesn't try to channel Taylor as if she was a serious actress going for the low-hanging fruit of a biopic Oscar. She just emotes either too much or not enough, shouting "I'm bored!" at a certain point with a flatness that only displays the ennui of the viewer. She cries, but you never see her wracked with sobs. And, worst of all, she never once shows the wit and charm that made Taylor a superstar worthy of a made-for-cable movie in the first place. No, perhaps even worse, there is no physical transformation at all. The whole time she looks like Lindsay in a wig. Taylor, whose weight fluctuated as much as Lindsay's probation status, never gets bigger or smaller in the movie, even when trouble with her weight becomes a plot point. There is no passage of time or changing of emotion. The whole thing is static. Grant Bowler is fine as Burton, but no one is really paying any attention to him anyway. It's probably the exact same problem Burton had in real life, so at least that is some verisimilitude we can take to the bank.
The movie itself is rather poorly constructed. We start with the last day of Burton's life, a poor framing device that we return to again at the end. We also see Liz and Dick, wearing all black in a black room, sitting in black director's chairs, commenting on the action because neither actors are good enough to convey what their characters are thinking or feeling in each scene. So they have to tell us about it. The rest of the narrative is written like a bad children's book report: This happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Like an illustrated Wikipedia entry, there is no narrative arc or cause and effect relationship between the scenes. In the end, we never quite understand why they fell in love in the first place, why they fought so intensely, or why they ever stayed together.
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Many will probably tune in tonight hoping to laugh at Lindsay. We haven't seen her in anything but mug shots and paparazzi pictures in a long time, but she seems much worse than the last time we saw her. Any talent she had was snuffed out by something. It could be the drugs, it could be her legal struggles, it could be that Mean Girlswas just a fluke on the way to obscurity. Who knows. But like this movie, her brutal acting isn't something that's funny or outrageous in an entertaining way. It's just sad. And that makes Lifetime's troll of casting her in the first place not only disingenuous, but also sort of cruel. Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan [Photo Credit: Lifetime] More: New 'Liz &amp; Dick' Trailer Offers Little New Footage, Is Still Hilarious Lindsay Lohan in the 'Liz &amp; Dick' Trailer: 'They Drink, They Fight, They Fornicate' Lindsay Lohan Talks About Liz Taylor's Drinking in New 'Liz &amp; Dick' Clip
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Australian actor Grant Bowler portrays Richard Burton opposite Lohan's Elizabeth Taylor in the film, which will debut in America on Sunday (25Nov12) - and he admits there were a lot of challenges for the cast and crew as his co-star struggled with off-set dramas.
Lohan was briefly hospitalised after a car crash on her way to work one morning and filming had to be halted when she was found unconscious in her hotel suite.
Bowler states, "We certainly took our time in a lot of ways, where I would have preferred to be shooting... I got a lot of stuff done, I answered a lot of emails. I got brought in a stack of, I think, 4,000 fan cards at one point and, in between two scenes, I was able to sign them all."
But he isn't complaining about the stop-start nature of the project, which he shot in Los Angeles earlier this year (12).
Bowler tells U.S. news show Access Hollywood Live, "A part of the job is you're off when you're off, you're on when you're on and you're focused... Every single job is an opportunity to get better at my job. I've been doing this for 22 years and all I care about at the end of the day is how well I do at my job and how well I serve my audience.
"There were exercises in patience and there were exercises in tolerance and I believe it could have been smoother at times... and we could have got a lot more done on a couple of days, but you get what you're given and when I was 18, 19, I dug ditches on the side of a hill for a living; it's not as bad as that."
The reviews for the film have been mixed, although many critics have raved about Bowler's Burton.
The actor himself gives the film a B, stating, "The make-up, wardrobe and sets haven't been given enough attention... Our hair, make-up and wardrobe people did a phenomenal job; they should all be up for awards... The look of the thing is phenomenal.
"There's so many aspects of this movie where everybody put in to the absolute limit of their ability... and we did have crew members going down, they were exhausted, they were falling apart because they were putting so much into it... We had an Academy Award winning crew who were literally working themselves to the point of exhaustion."

Screen legend Elizabeth Taylor wasn't a lady of many secrets (though how she turned White Diamonds into a $75 million-a-year fragrance is still a mystery for the ages) but there's one thing that we didn't know anything about until now. Apparently she made really awful noises when she puked. Yes, it's true, at least according to this clip from the instant-camp-classic Lifetime movie Liz &amp; Dick.
In the scene Lindsay and Grant Bowler run into screenwriter Ernest Lehman, played by Miranda's Husband from Sex and the City. After some clunky exposition, he tells them they're totally wrong for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and they don't fight enough, so they totally start a brawl about who sounds worse when they vomit from being too wasted. Yes, the clip is made to make us think that they're going to stop the party by getting into a huge brawl, but they're really just going to stop fighting in two more lines and then have a giggle with Miranda's Husband from Sex and the City after he figures out how great they are at fighting and how good they'll be in the movie. Oh hahaahahahahaha. We all clutch our pearls together and sip our martinis and giggle. Aren't they the pair?
Man this thing is going to be so wondrously awful. Set your DVR now, because it's on Sunday, November 25. It may try to refuse to tape something this cheesy, but you have to make it. Don't let the machines win.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: Lifetime]
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'Liz &amp; Dick': Lindsay Lohan is One Classy Liz Taylor

Lifetime's original biopic of Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor — featuring controversial young actress/celebrity headlines mainstay Lindsay Lohan — is fast approaching, with a release date set for the end of this month. Lohan has thus far showed off quite the polarizing portrayal of Taylor in the previously released trailers for the Liz &amp; Dick. She has exhibited Taylor's tumultuous marriage to husband Richard Burton (played in the Lifetime movie by Grant Bowler), as well as the pair's complicated relationship with the spotlight. These new images from the forthcoming project offer an even wider array of what we'll be seeing Lohan embody: Taylor's memorable role in the 1963 film Cleopatra, the actress' high-society lifestyle, and some of the sweeter moments between her and Bowler.
Check out these new images, and catch the film on Nov. 25 on Lifetime.
[Photo Credit: Lifetime(4)]
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The second episode of Revenge. The weekend. The leftover piece of cheese I couldn't finish last night. There are many things that I'm more excited about than Lifetime's Liz &amp; Dick biopic, but, still, I can't tear myself away from its hilariously sensational promos. Not that I'm not used to Lifetime's patented flair for drama (how can we forget Rob Lowe's "I'm untouchable, bitch!"), but there's something about Lindsay Lohan's determination playing Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor that's just damn appealing... and so ripe for comedy. (And that's coming from one of the starlet's longtime supporters.) The posture, which was no doubt a result of a long, hard study of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof photo stills. The slapping(!). The all-to-telling and frightening shot of Lohan as an older Taylor. And, please, please tell me this is somehow chronicled.
Below, watch the short clip, which offers little new content from the first promo, save the aforementioned slap and Richard Burton's (Grant Bowler) incredulous exclamation, "Why the hell did I marry you?" But be warned: The whole display is very high school drama club. But maybe I'm just being a mean girl.
[Image Credit: Lifetime]
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Even though the late movie icon was a two-time Oscar winner, the Mean Girls star insists her experiences as a tabloid spectacle made her perfect for the part.
In a new promotional video for the film, Lohan says, "I'm a huge Elizabeth Taylor fan, and I relate to her on a lot of levels - living in the public eye, dealing with the stress of what other people say, whether it's true or not.
"I personally understand Liz because you're living your life for everyone to see and people are growing with you. You get to a point where you become numb to it, and you just live your life in that way you feel you need to live it."
Lohan's co-star, Grant Bowler, insists the 26-year-old actress nailed the part: "She's pretty much Elizabeth Taylor reincarnated."

The folks over at Lifetime who are behind the upcoming Elizabeth Taylor biopic TV movie Liz &amp; Dick aren't exactly playing down the overt Lindsay Lohan comparisons. From the poster with leading lady Lohan standing in front of highlighted LiLo buzz-phrases like "scandal," "child star," and "paparazzi" (what, no fetch?) to the new teaser trailer that almost requires no visuals.
If you closed your eyes with the preview on, first you might think it's a Bing commercial thanks to the use of Alex Clare's "Too Close." But after that you might mistake it for a Lohan biopic rather than a Taylor biopic. Case in point, same sound bites:
- "You're screwing that witch?" Lohan cries. Samantha Ronson rumors aside, there's also a good chance this is key dialogue between Lohan and Charlie Sheen in Scary Movie 5.
- "God, that woman knows how to make an entrance," marvels Grant Bowler as Richard Burton. Oh, Lohan knows how to make entrances alright. Exits, too. - "They drink, they fight, they fornicate." No comment. - "Ugh, who's counting?" whines an annoyed Lohan. Don't worry, we've all lost count of the shenanigans, too. Watch — and listen to — the Liz &amp; Dick teaser trailer below, and see if you can find all the Lohan buzz-words and -phrases. (We found nearly a dozen, including "scandalous," "dangerous," and "infamous.")
Liz &amp; Dick, the unofficial unintentional Lindsay Lohan Lifetime movie, airs in November.
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Summary

After decades of work on television in New Zealand and his native Australia, Grant Bowler came to Hollywood where he launched a slow-burning but consistent career. American audiences first came to know Bowler as the authoritarian Captain Gault on the hit series "Lost" (ABC, 2004-2010), but he was perhaps best known as Connor Owens, the corrupt CFO and love interest of Vanessa Williams' villainous Wilhelmina Slater on "Ugly Betty" (ABC, 2006-2010). Splitting his time between the United States and Australia, Bowler continued to entertain antipodean audiences as the host of "The Amazing Race Australia" (ABC, 2011-12), but it would be his work as the biker/werewolf Cooter on "True Blood" (HBO, 2008- ) that would keep him at the forefront of American television. Having built a following on "True Blood," in 2012, Bowler stepped into a lead role, playing the late Richard Burton opposite Lindsay Lohan's Elizabeth Taylor in the notorious television biopic, "Liz & Dick" (Lifetime, 2012). His early decades as a hardworking, sometimes struggling actor proved Grant Bowler to be a resilient, grounded talent whose strength and tenacity ran deeper than his matinee idol looks.